Aliens and American Civil Religion.


If Bellah is right, and there is an American civil religion, where elements of the empire's civil institutions are constructed religiously, then the Military could be considered a priestly class, or was at least. Set apart, respected and beloved beyond others, they become a group of martyrs and pioneers, protecting civilians, preserving order, and maintaining the conflicted values that make America. They are convinced to become soldiers by the recruiters theistic language, once all male, schools like Annapolis and West Point became seminaries, presidents pray with them and for them, when they die they are sent home with Christian language, and buried under gravestones perpetually cared for, emblazoned with the graphic of faith. The setting apart of this class, with it's own language, is indicative of Bellah's argument: “What people say on solemn occasions need not be taken at face value, but it is often indicative of deep-seated values and commitments that are not made explicit in the course of everyday life.” (From Biblical Religion and Civil Religion, first published by Daedalus, June 1967, found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20050306124338/http://www.robertbellah.com/articles_5.htm).

He starts talking about Kennedy, who gave us Vietnam, and who died in the back of a Cadillac in Texas, was the origin of the last of the periods of Chaos where the American Civil Relgion fell apart. If the civil religions status is to preserve order, to clean and reconstruct chaos so that it becomes once again “the shining city on the hill” (cf Winthrop, Regan) then one has to re-establish the other. Bellah hints that this work would be done, and talks about how language was being manipulated already: “
Those nations that are for the moment “on our side” become “the free world.” A repressive and unstable military dictatorship in South Vietnam becomes “the free people of South Vietnam and their government.” It is then part of the role of America as the New Jerusalem and “the last best hope of earth” to defend such governments with treasure and eventually with blood. When our soldiers are actually dying, it becomes possible to consecrate the struggle further by invoking the great theme of sacrifice. For the majority of the American people who are unable to judge whether the people in South Vietnam (or wherever) are “free like us,” such arguments are convincing. " (ibid)

Remember, that this is the sequel to an original, that was made in 1979, 5 years after the fall of Saigon, and the second in 1986, a decade past. Still fresh wounds in the memory of the body politic, the obsession with making money in the 1980s became in the minds of certain conservatives the rewards of living after the horrors and sacrifices of that decade, and those wars. Like the Terminator films, Predator, Rambo, Commando, and the like, all done in the same few years, they become part of a well of ultra patriotic films with the military successfully destroying often grotesque or mechanical other.

In this film, the monsters are so viscous, so alien, that to commit genocide against them is necessary. The only person who ends up agreeing is the slimy corporate lawyer, who argues for the self-hood of the liberation “clearly important species right to arbitraryly exterminate them” He places this fairly reasonable argument, in the midst of several discussions of saving samples to experiment on them, and eventually tries to impregnate Ripley and the found feral child Newt, with the monsters eggs. His argument against the genocide of an entire planet is an artificial one, intended to get what he wants.

These aliens deserve to be killed, because they killed 157 colonists. The colonists, because they were human or at least humanoid, had more of a place to be on the planet then the natives. That they are willing to kill a child, and because Ripley becomes maternal, constructs these people are monsterious, amoral, fundamentally incapable of reason, when one of the marines asks “how could they cut the power, they are animals”, it becomes the kind of distancing language that America uses for most of its enterprises. The film complicates this language though, this construction of American civil religion and mythology. It criticises capitalism, at least obliquely. It rarely mentions God. It regularly places a child in danger. It allows a woman to destroy the enemy. It fully integrates by gender and race the American military. The robot is the hero. It becomes a more difficult movie then the action movies made at the same time and place.

The corporatism of Reiser's character is considered excessive, his constant mentioning of money over humanity, or property over humanity, makes him almost parodic of the excesses of Regan. When Ripley tells him “I don't know which species is worse, you don't see them fucking each over for a god damn percentage” places those who seek money over the loyalty of the brigade as monstrous, in fact so monstrous that they are worse then the enemies they are fighting.

That God damn is one of the few mentions of God, and it seems vestigial. All of the other signifiers of military experience, the naughty stories, the sexual harassment, the gung -ho attitude, the willingness to die, the camaraderie and even the language is there. The Space Marines have an authentic feel, similar to the real marines. But when they eat they do not say grace, and when they leave to go to the ship, they do not say a naval prayer. It is more common to use the Anglo Saxon language when encountering an enemy then it is to use theistic language. In this way, the rigours, rituals, and linguistic sites of the American military, the priestly class of the American civil religion has replaced the rigours, rituals and linguistic sites of more traditional religious texts.

When I saw Newt almost being killed by Reiser, when she was captured by the aliens after t hat, when she was thought to be killed several times, and when she finally was saved by Ripley thanks to Bishop , it seemed to be a corrective. Think of My Lai, with the American military killing children, or the carpet bombing of Laos or Cambodia, done at the tail end of a war that the Americans lost. The priestly class raped women and killed children. The sense of honour, of devotion to a larger cause was broken (this violation of the American Civil Religion might be why Bellah claimed it as one of the gaps in the central faith).

That the military died before they could do the final rescue, that the rescue was completed by civilians were indicative of this break in the usual structure of discourses around soldiers in the US. That a small girl was the one to be saved from the attack, and that she was saved by another woman, who was willing to be scared, to cry, to mother, and also proved to be able to fly, to operate heavy machinery, and to be adroit with barely any training, guns and flame throwers, that the last scene between Ripley who is trying to save Newt, and the queen who is trying to avenge the killing of her children, becoming a battle of matriarchy gives the viewers another way to think of heroics, outside the phallocentric auspices of both corporate control and military intervention.

That is not to say, that women and people of colour did not commit heroics in this film. Vasquez, a Hispanic woman, who is fully one of the marine corps dies in order to save Ripley, but she is not allowed the emotion of Ripley, and has the training that sublimates the self to the rituals and language of the American military establishment. That Ripley, and the Artifical American are the only two left, allows for a more pluralistic, wider idea of what this civil religion could consist of. So it is patriotic, it allows for the colonists to be good people, and it commits genocide against an other that is too alien, and therefore unsympathetic. It is a movie that maintains the idea of American empire, while problemtaizing some of its more recent excesses. In this way, it attempts towards another kind of progress, one that allows Americans there holy ideas of eminent domain and manifest destiny.